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OCZ RevoDrive 350 480 GB Review

OCZ RevoDrive 350 480GB Conclusion:

When most people think of PCIe based solid state drives, they think that the configuration is built more for the enterprise market. For the most part, they would be right in assuming that there would be no place for a drive the caliber of the RevoDrive 350 in a consumer type build. Typically, the form factor is price prohibitive for the performance gained from using the drive for the average consumer. At just over $800 for the 480GB model shown here, it is more expensive than a quartet of 120GB drives in a RAID 0 configuration. However, for the added cost, you get added functionality.

Using OCZ's Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA), the drive is seen as a single entity rather than four separate drives, enabling ease of installation, SMART and TRIM support, 50GB of data writes a day for three years, and no hassles setting up a RAID array. All pretty stout features to go along with this drive. There are few PCIe 2.0 x8 devices on the market to compare with, but thanks to the RevoDrive 350's quartet of LSI Sandforce SF2282 NAND controllers and low-cost Toshiba 19nm MLC NAND, you get enterprise-grade hardware capable of delivering outstanding performance of up to 1800 MB/s sequential reads and up to 1700 MB/s sequential writes. Something you surely will not see when using four drives without costly added hardware expenses.

Built for heavy duty workloads, the drive excels where simple SATA 6Gbps RAID arrays start to falter. A two-drive RAID 0 setup using a pair of OCZ's own Vertex 450 drives equipped with OCZ's Barefoot controller give the RevoDrive 350 a run for its money in some workloads, but as the workload increases, the RevoDrive 350 excels. After taking some time to take this drive for a spin, it's tough to find something not to like. It's fast, easy to set up, looks great (for a drive at least), and can handle anything you can throw at it. Equipped with a three-year warranty, you can rest assured that OCZ will be around to take care of any problems now that the company is a subsidiary of Toshiba. To that end, this drive will most likely end up running through some long term testing in my video capture system, where it will be easy to test the 50GB worth of writes per day. Game on!